A woman died early Christmas morning in a house fire sparked by an artificial Christmas tree. Destiny Abdrazack, 22, was celebrating Christmas Eve with her fiancé’s family in their California home when an electrical short from the tree ignited a roaring fire around 2am Sunday, local NBC affiliate KCRA3 reported. Ms Abdrazack yelled that there were flames, awakening the five others in the house, which didn’t have working smoke alarms, according to her fiancé’s father Ernest Isom.
“She was the one who yelled fire, and that’s the sad part,” Mr Isom told KCRA3 of the woman who was to be his future daughter-in-law. “She saved our lives.”
Ms Abdrazack was pulled out of the burning building by firefighters, but later died from her injuries at an area hospital.
The five others in the house — Mr Isom, his wife and son and two other adults — survived.
Mr Isom said the family had fallen asleep without turning off the Christmas tree lights.
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“You could see the flickering light on the tree and that’s kind of like the telltale sign of a fire,” Richard Byers said.
The neighbour ran out of his house and grabbed a fire extinguisher while another neighbour used a garden house to try to put out the blaze to no avail.
The fire just came right back,” Mr Byers said. “It was too intense, moving too fast.”
His wife, Brandy Byers said when they came out of their home three doors down they saw Mr Isom’s family standing outside shouting for help.
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“They were screaming, ‘Destiny! There’s someone inside! There’s someone inside!” Brandy Byers told KCRA3. “There [was] nothing any of us could do.”
Firefighters rescued Ms Abdrazack from the living room of the home and she was taken to an area hospital in critical condition.
Her family confirmed her death the next day and set up a GoFundMe to raise money to cover her hospital and funeral expenses.
Christmas tree fires are “a very small but notable” part of the fire problem in the US, according to a report from the National Fire Protection Association.
The analysis from the Massachusetts-based nonprofit includes estimates of the frequency of home fires involving Christmas trees and is reportedly based on data from the US Fire Administration’s National Fire Incident Reporting System, as well as survey data.
Blazes that begin with an ignited Christmas tree account for less than 0.1 percent of all reported home fires, the report says.
Yet despite a steady decline in annual frequency, tree-involved fires continue to pose a fire hazard.
From 2016 to 2020, according to the National Fire Protection Association report data, fire departments responded to an estimated annual average of nearly 160 home structure fires involving a Christmas tree.
